Remove two screws from the bottom of the phone – easy, I can totally do this!
Soften the glue and pull out the back – hmm, I guess it's doable if I can find replacement glue.
Disconnect dozens of cables and parts – wow, it's going to be hard to remember how everything goes back together.
Peel off protective foam from motherboard – is it even possible to replace this stuff?
CNC grind the existing 128GB NAND to dust – I should probably stop watching now...
I suppose they have had several training rounds using badly broken phones first.
Can't be very many of those yet. The iPhone 16 only became available for sale last Friday.
Most of all the components on the other side of the PCB.
Even if the NAND was not additionally covered in resin, due to the large amount of contacts (and probably large amount of grounded pins, which dissipate heat faster), alot of heat would be needed. More than the smaller components underneath need to just fall off then...
Of course, reflowing the components in an ad-hoc way is quite likely to cause other problems, so it's probably still a good idea to avoid it.
But yeah, getting that chip off with just heat looks pretty hard without affecting anything else. I'd still want a heat sink to pull away heat from other parts but I'm not at this skill level and overly cautious. But this does look doable.
And since it's HN, I do encourage everyone to give more repair a go. Things like micro soldering are easier than you think. And remember than your phones can be turned into servers (raspberry pi? How about my old nexus?). Though I'd love to hear if people know how to do this stuff on iPhones because I plan on switching over. I guess no more bash scripting for automatic backup of all my photos and stuff to my server :'( someone please tell me there's a way )':
Very little in the realm of "server" or "raspberry pi alternative" could be done with modern iPhones despite even a 2-year old iphone being OP in terms of hardware for most home server tasks. They really work hard to prevent any use besides what's officially blessed by Tim Apple himself. Whether that's "for your own good" or not is a matter of opinion, I happen to think it's lame but don't want to debate it.
But I'm more interested in being able to use my current bash scripts that run on my Pixel. Backup is really the only important one since I can connect to my computers from anywhere to do anything else
But it does look like there is some success
Alternatively there is iSH or a-Shell.
Idk if I'll feel comfortable jailbreaking a new 16, but yeah apple is fucking weird.
==== Apple engineers, I know you're here ====
- Airport
Deprecated.
- networksetup
Not associated with AirPort network
- wdutil
Not only requires sudo, but you redact the SSID. To a root user‽‽‽
- ioreg -ln Airport driver | perl -lne 'print $1 if $_ =~ /IO80211SSID.*"(.*)"/;'
Redacted
- system_profiler SPAirPortDataType | awk '/Current Network/ {getline;$1=$1;print $0 | "tr -d ':'";exit}'
Takes 10 seconds to run but at least it fucking works and doesn't require sudo!
What
The
ᵃⁿᵈ ⁱ ᵈᵒⁿ'ᵗ ᵐᵉᵃⁿ ᵗʰⁱˢ ˡⁱᵍʰᵗˡʸ
FUCK
‽‽‽
I have been amazed at how little information there is about this. Maybe I just don't know the right areas to look. But I tried google, reddit, stack, several LLMs[0] and never once did I come across ipconfig. Where should I be looking?
[0] Of course LLMs were just repeating the same stuff as reddit and SO and would continually forget that airplay got deprecated despite being in the prompt and me telling them multiple times after it suggested it over and over....
And for those that just want SSID, try either of these
ipconfig getsummary en0 | grep -e '[^B]SSID' | cut -d " " -f5
ipconfig getsummary en0 | grep -e '[^B]SSID' | sed -E 's/^.*: (.*)/\1/g'
But I'm still just confused by the decisions being made over at Apple. I understand hand holding those who don't know much but they do realize that the reason their device is so common among engineers is because it's not too dissimilar from Linux, right? Why attack power users? What's being gained? That's what I don't get.
The Mac is the exception in their current product lineup: every other platform is heavily locked down, and the user’s behaviour heavily restricted.
I strongly believe the Mac is heading in the same direction. See the progression from run what you want, to optional signing of binaries, to right click to run unsigned things, to disable a setting to be able to run unsigned binaries; or “worse”, the way spctl and csrutil no longer function after deploying Sequoia.
I do think part of the problem is not enough engineers asking their bosses why. Or not enough engineers thinking decisions through. I hope to god it's not a lack of engineers that are power users because that's even worse in many ways, but I wouldn't be surprised.
I wouldn't turn a cell phone into a server without also disabling the wireless chipsets somehow. Knowing that some unknown number of people working for your phone manufacturer, your wireless carrier, and Google or Apple have privileged access, including the the ability to remote into your phone at any time and add/delete/modify files and install software, without any notice or even indication to you that something has been done isn't the kind of security/privacy I'd want on a server.
Manufacturers and carriers have had it in their terms of service that they can do it.
Here's what tmobile had in their ToS:
We may remotely change software, systems, applications, features or programming on your Device without notice. These changes will modify your Device and may affect or erase data you have stored on your Device, the way you have programmed your Device, or the way you use your Device. You will not be able to use your Device during the installation of the changes, even for emergencies.
Plus, you know this is about software updates, right? It's generic but that's what it's about. Yes, upgrading means removing files at times as things get refactored or become obsolete, but they're not going to touch your main data, not that software isn't shitty and accidents happen.
I'd also like some source on that deleting file part. These companies aren't spending money editing your software post security updates.
They become mandatory in the EU after 2027 so I expect them to make a strong comeback at some point.
We didn’t invent writing, drawing, and photographing for nothing.
1. Have small storage boxes numbered 1 through 1000.
2. Before and after detaching anything, take photos (multiple, if needed)
3. Draw arrow/circle/… indicators on the photos to help you remember what to look at.
4. Whatever comes loose, put it in the next labeled box.
5. Take a photo of the filled box and the tool(s) you used to detach that part.
6. When putting things back together, work backwards through your photos.
Do that for 20-30 steps and you need an assistant or two to not lose track of what you're doing, and spend an hour in post editing out all the times you side tracked fighting the camera.
The being said, I'm wondering if he used something like a cheap SainSmart CNC... sounded like a dentist drill
It's not going to be hard. You won't even need to note where everything goes. The sizes of the cables/parts are different and as a result you'll be able to match them up.
But if you do that regularly, you probably have the money to buy the 1TB version outright.
Ah yes, Apple, the king of repairability!